Posted 04 August 2012 - 12:12 PM

So the areal density of unemployment changes abruptly at the borders of California, Ohio, W. Virginia, etc.? Am I the only person who suspects on this basis that the map overinterprets the data?

It looks like a dot density map of state unemployment rates. The states with higher population densities will show higher dot density for their corresponding unemployment rates. So California's 10% unemployment will produce much more dots than Nevada's 9% due to their respective populations.